Forms?

[StraygoatWriting]

My client has a lot of forms that their staff need to fill in and send back to HQ. They would like these forms to be electronic if possible. I know you can create forms in HTML, but no idea how the data entered is stored, or whether it works within Flare.

Is it possible to create forms in Flare? The client just needs them to be filled in and returned, via email would be okay, I think, although data protection/encryption might be an issue. Has anyone done this sort of thing before and has advice?

Also, they could really do with secure log ins for the Flare output. Any advice on ways to implement that would be appreciated too.

Thanks

[RamonS]

You can create forms using the standard HTML controls. I am quite sure that will work fine with Flare, but Flare itself does not have tools to add these controls. You'd need to add the HTML code yourself. Each HTML form needs to have a submit button that requires a target URL, that tells the browser to send the entered data to the web server that then passes it on to the specified target. That is typically some sort of server side script that validates the entries, sanitizes them, then passes them on to the database layer for storage, and tells the browser what to do next (if necessary).

You could add secure login in the same way, but it might be easier to do that at the web server.

The forms are a development task, the secure login is something for a web server admin to put in place. Unless you want to take a crack at it I suggest talking to developers/IT to get this in place. It is a bit outside of what Flare is currently intended to do.

[StraygoatWriting]

Thanks. I could create the forms and then hand them over, I suppose. I'm not sure there are IT or development people to hand them over to though!

I will pass the info on and see what they say.

[RamonS]

Someone needs to write the back end code to store the entries in some form of database. It does not have to be an SQL database, but could be a CSV file where rows are appended, but the development effort is about the same. The difference is that a file does not come with the admin overhead that a database brings with it, but querying a file is not that easy unless you use a scripting runtime that already comes with a CSV parser. In any case, you can add the forms, but the submit action attribute needs some target to pass the entries to and you need to know that in order to make things work.
You do want some web dev to work on this who has experience. Since you want to secure the entire project you also have to make sure that the records are stored securely, that data entry is cleaned properly, encoded properly, or rejected. At least you have to make sure to prevent SQL, HTML, and JavaScript injections, and you also should see that cross-site scripting is not possible.

You are crossing from plain documentation into software development that needs requirements, design, implementation, and above all rigorous testing using modern tools and test plans (if you do not document the test results you did not test it!). I could help out with testing if there is a need, I could also write the code, but I assume that you want to get this into production rather sooner than later. My coding skills are rather dusty and time is in short supply. If you want to take a go at it, look into coding this using the XAMPP stack unless you have to make this work on IIS. You can then still use PHP which is probably the easiest to learn web development language. Oh, and also figure out how deployment and fixes/updates are going to work with the intent of keeping existing data intact. You might need to craft fix up scripts or do manual changes to the database schema. It isn't as easy as slapping a few forms into a page and be done with it.

[StraygoatWriting]

Thanks Ramon, but I seriously don't want to try it! I already find my work crosses too much into web dev territory and it's not something that I want to get more involved in. Leave that to the people that actually like doing development and coding, I'll stick to writing for humans

The info is much appreciated. I will pass it on to the decision-makers.

[sarrants]

We were looking for Flare to handle this. We decided to look into doing it ourselves. In the end, we went with a web service (Cognito Forms). It wasn't too difficult to create the forms and their service handles the encryption and electronic signatures. For our needs (almost 100 sep. fields), it was a good choice.